Displays Settings in GNOME 3.10

The display settings for GNOME hasn’t seen a major change since before 3.0, so with the design help of Allan Day, I had the chance to completely update the interface for 3.10. The interface now follows the new visual style of the other settings panels and simplifies tasks such as setting the primary display. It also includes simpler and clearer display indicators. Full details of the redesign, including the mockups, are available on the wiki page. Not everything is complete yet; “presentation mode” needs some additional support from the windowing system before it can be implemented. However, Wayland support is now available thanks to Giovanni Campagna’s work on Mutter and gnome-desktop, which also includes a new confirmation dialog provided by gnome-shell.

Please keep the option to turn off the laptop display when plugged in to an external monitor. I keep my laptop lid open so I can suspend easily by pressing the power button. It rather not have to close and open the lid each time I would like to suspend or wake the laptop.

I’d love to see it remember my settings according to attached monitors (basically, if I dock at my desk, use the 2-monitor config, if I unplug the laptop switch to the internal-display-only config). Right now I have to open display settings whenever I unplug the external monitor.

Will these settings be applied in GDM too? I have a laptop with a broken screen and in GDM it is the default screen (even though I’ve turned it off in Display Settings). This makes it a bit cumbersome for me to log in sometimes.

Just about all modern radeons support 4-6 displays, so please make sure you can easily accomodate more than 2. Also, I would echo the request to be able to turn off the laptop display from within the monitor applet without having to close the lid.

So, just to make life hard for the UI designer, I will mention a couple lovely scenarios that hw designers have given us:

1) hw that supports multiple displays but with bandwidth limits. Ie. maybe you can drive 3 or 4 displays at lower resolutions, but only 2 at higher resolutions
2) or more fun, in intel ivb, you can drive 3 displays but with constraint that two of them must be same connector type (ie. DP1 and DP2), and the same resolution and refresh rate.

At the kernel (drm/kms) level, we plan to deal with this with atomic modeset. Ie. give the kernel an API, where it can request multiple outputs to be configured simulatenously. Or rejected if the combination cannot work together. There will be a “dry-run” flag, so userspace has a way to check whether a combination of modes is possible or not. Up at userspace, xrandr will need a similar proto update, to expose the same sort of API to the client.

But how to wrap this up in a sane UI that isn’t confusing to the end user, I have no idea

Anyways, as long as you are re-designing the UI, you probably want to consider these crazy sort of cases.